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Monthly Archives: April 2013

I know I haven’t posted for far too long. It’s really embarrassing, especially since I now aspire to be an admissions blogger at MIT.

Wait, what?

Yeah. I committed to MIT. I’m going to be a Beaver (or maybe an Engineer or an IHTFPer or whatever), and I couldn’t be happier! So now that the college admissions process is done until I (hopefully don’t have to) apply to grad school, what am I up to? Moreover, what have I been up to for the past month and a half? Why haven’t I been blogging?

I could post myriad excuses, and depending on how the rest of this blog post goes, I very well might. However, for the time being, I think it would be more appropriate if I directed your attention to Hawgrade!

Hi, Hawgrade! What the heck are you, anyway?

You can actually see the live version of this website at www.hawgrade.com. Now, to answer the caption’s snarky question, Hawgrade is grading for the Twenty First Century, developed with the help of one of the social studies teachers at my school, Dave Hawley. Mr. Hawley also goes by Hawley, hence the name Hawgrade. The website will eventually join forces with an iPad app, and the two will offer the following functionality:

Corrections for the most common student mistakes built in. This makes grading most papers as simple as highlighting passages and pressing a few buttons.

Recording voice comments to end the time consuming process of actually writing comments on students’ work.

Returning students’ corrected papers over email.

Most of that functionality has been implemented by now. It’s a wonderful culmination to my high school career, although it is unfortunate that I (a second semester senior) actually have to work on something! It’s also an enormous project. Maybe I’ll post some of my secret, proprietary code samples on this blog.